Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days

About a year ago, if you’ll remember, I posted a snippet from Al Columbia’s anthology Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days. Over Christmas in New York City, I dropped by the amazing comics shop, Forbidden Planet, and picked it up. I’m very late to the party here, and there have been plenty of reviews of it online, so I’m just going to quickly toss a few thoughts in and add to the chorus.

Because the book is a fragmented mess of half-completed, scrapped comics, maybe the best way to review it is through some sort of super-pretentious gestalt word vomit exercise. Here we go:

horror • disgust • unease • amusement • terror • awe • distortion • innocence • despair • zombies • lust • betrayal • paranoia • beauty • john lithgow • loneliness

Well, doesn’t this book just sound like a blast to read? In truth, the book carries huge emotional heft, even though a nothing resembling a narrative ever threatens to congeal from the mess of scraps. Columbia has an amazing talent for crafting potent images, and telling stories in very small spaces.

It’s all the stuff of nightmares: the death of a loved one, the fear of being lost, the terror of sleep paralysis when you can swear a knife-wielding monster is shuffling closer and closer to your door. The sensation generated is an overwhelming, macabre curiosity. You have to know what will happen on the next page, especially because it’s so uncertain of a particular storyline is going to continue to the next page.

When every artfully placed panel could represent a bleak ending, Columbia realizes that a few breaks are in order. Of course, you won’t find any positive thinking here – the brief reprieves from terror are mostly stocked with bravado, cynicism, lust, and the pure will to love to see another day. It’s not the best side of humanity represented here, by any measure.

So far, you should have picked up on two things:

1. this book is intense
2. you should buy this book on Amazon, because it is cheaper there and I will get some money if you do
3. you should also tell your friends to buy this book on Amazon, because I will make even more money

But there’s more to this review than adulation and greed. Just a little while ago, one of my friends pointed out an interview with Al Columbia that reveals how difficult it was for him to draw these comics and put the book together. Turns out, he’s not immune to the images he creates:

Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head … it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.

via ComicsComics

I’d be lying if I said the result wasn’t fascinating. I talked in a previous blog post about sincerity. This book epitomizes it, in all its schizophrenic struggle. Get ahold of this book somehow—it’s a quick and unforgettable read.

This is just cool

via Arthurmag, via Jordan:

Here we are, about two weeks from the release of Al Columbia’s first book in almost a decade.  Pim & Francie is already receiving advance praise from folks like Spike Jonze…Al’s always working on something new and amazing, whether it’s music, filmmaking, comics, or in this case, painting.  Al showed me a photo of this new painting he was working on and I became immersed in the labyrinth of frayed facade and haunting beauty.

(click for full view)

Darkseid Minus New Gods

Oh, Gavok, you done made Kirby so proud.

There’s not much I can add here that other blogs haven’t said already: Think of Garfield Minus Garfield, only instead of being treated to a pathetic, helpless thirty-year-old virgin manchild, Darkseid Minus New Gods introduces us to an insane, solipsistic ancient personification of evil, and he probably doesn’t even have a penis! Oh, Darkseid.  We all feel bad that Batman shot you now that we’ve seen into the tormented cyclone of your psyche!

Thanks DC Universe!

One more especially funny clip after le jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Elf With A Gun

Well, I don’t even know what else you can say about this. (Thanks Jordan!)

Gone & Forgotten:

Intermittently throughout his groundbreakingly awesome run on The Defenders, Gerber would draw attention away from the primary plot for a seemingly unconnected series of vignettes in which otherwise ordinary people caught in the midst of doing nothing spectacular were suddenly set upon by a homicidal mythical midget intent on shooting them down like wooden ducks on a fairway …

More elf with a gun, including the stirring finale, at Gone & Forgotten.

Forming

An excellent weekly comic by Jesse Moynihan – only about 11 pages in thus far.  It’s straightforwardly weird, weirdly straightforward and often hilarious. Family drama and covert ops suspense. Plus I think it might explain the origins of biblical history.  (Thanks Jordan!)

The bearded recluse speaks

A great, long-form interview with Alan Moore in Wired, definitely worth a lunchtime read:

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, “This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we’ll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them.” I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn’t really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

(via Casual Optimist)